G Cooper is correct. Tories should be fighting speed cameras and, indeed, all street cameras, tooth and nail. This is how low they’ve sunk. This is how they’ve allowed themselves to be bullied by the politically correct cosa nostra. Until they offer to take down every street camera in Britain and replace them with police on foot, they can forget about credibility as the providers of an alternative, freer, philosophy of governance.

I don’t really see the problem with speed cameras (and red-light cameras) per se, provided they are triggered only by breach of the relevant traffic rule. Cars are dangerous things for third parties and we need some common rules how they are to be driven so that other people will know what to expect. I’d like to get by with as few rules as possible, of course; but those rules should be enforced.

What is infuriating is the moral panic that’s being used to squeeze private motorists off the road, which the Councillor seems hypocritically to have supported. Speed limits and other road conditions are now being set and enforced based not on reasonable consideration for road-users of all types, but arbitrary risk aversion, administrative conveniences and fixations, and the punitive zeal of pressure groups.

I would take issue with you over the relevance of speed cameras for many reasons, but perhaps this isn’t either the time or place.

You are, however, right on the money about pressure groups. And one of the worst of these is a shadowy bunch of eco-zealots, socialists and bus-huggers called Transport 2000.

It is high time that single issue pressure groups such as this mob were subject to detailed scrutiny by the (few remaining) independent media. There are many questions to be asked, including: Who funds these people? Why? Who is involved? What are their affiliations? What are their backgrounds? Just how many people do they actually represent?

In Transport 2000’s case, the answers to all the above could prove particularly enlightening.

And yet here is an organisation that raised sufficient money to challenge the government in the High Court over the issue of speed cameras – a challenge which it won, leading to the damned things being even more pernicious.

SIPGs also wield undue influence with the BBC (there’s a surprise) whose indolent editors suck on their news teats for a steady stream of ‘shock horror concern’ stories.

Surveillance cameras of all kinds are anathema and so are the sinister statist advocates who are sneaking them onto our streets in growing numbers.

They’re not just single-issue pressure groups; they tend to have a bundle of goals and exploit related “public issues”–using fear or sentimentality–to get there. Maybe “issue-merchants” would be a better phrase. All the media, independent or otherwise, loves them because they feed it a constant diet of stories.

What I find most worrying is the way they are automatically deemed to have some standing, without skepticism as to their motives and claims. If you cloak yourself in an “issue” it is immediately accepted that you are paradoxically disinterested, and stand for the general good, in a way no politician or avowedly commercial organisation could dream of.

Even the Consumer’s Association is reverently quoted, despite being a vast commercial publisher reponsible for a significant proportion of Britain’s junk mail. I look forward to the day when a Today interviewer says: “Come on, this is just a scare-story to publicise Which? Magazine, isn’t it?”. But not with great expectation.

Para Governmental Organisations like the ones you mention more often than not recive there funding either directly of indirectly from the taxpayer – which of course is why thy lobby so hard. I am prepared to bet that Transport 2000 has a research budget funded out of HMG revenues or even better the Lottery. In the European Parliament one Committee the Womans affairs Committee is almost a wholy owned subsidiary of an organisation that calls itself the European Womens Lobby. The EWL recives 90% of its funding from the organisation which it owns. Impressive no doubt, but highly dangerous.

Go and have a look at their website to see what your shekles suopport EWL

I wonder if roads were privately owned, whether the owners of them would install such things, since even in a pure laissez-faire transport world, speed limits in certain areas would have to operate. Be interested to know what transport writers like Patrick Crozier think.

Mind you, speed cameras on our current roads are little better than revenue-raising scams, plus they are also beloved by the anti-car, anti-freedom assholes of the left and the fogeyish old right. Sod them.

Intrigued by G Cooper’s questions about Transport 2000, I went to their website and it is, as one would expect, an opaque site presenting itself as transparent. They work, of course, “in partnership” with other similarly opaque bossy organisations – unnamed. Lots of talky gobbledygook. Organisations making up the Transport 2000 “umbrella” (their word) number 43, a list which includes the usual suspects, the Rambler’s Association, Friends of the Earth, Virgin, Cycle Campaign Network and the unsettlingly named Green Liberal Democrats. (Charles Kennedy, note to self: Must cut back.) Of the 43, 14 are initials only with no explanation of who they really are. OK, we all know who UNISON is, and the RSPB, but TCPA? CPRE? CPC?

They are funded, apparently, by “charitable trusts, public bodies, the transport industry, unions and individuals”. Needless to add, they “exchange ideas with similar bodies across Europe.” Gosh, there’s a gang of them.

Finally, their site is “Bobby approved”. So there you go, then. Who can be bothered fighting their way through these thickets of illiterate prose, self-importance, hidden agendas and political correctness? Needless to say, they have a Mission Statement, but I was flagging …

G Cooper – Yes, I would. Also UNISON might have a vested interest. Don’t know about Virgin, but Richard Branson’s never met a cause he didn’t think he could subvert to his own ends. Cyclers and ramblers are, by and large, not sullied by wads of cash …

I was going to run their home page through Bullfighter, but then I thought, why …? But in their transparent sounding opacity, they have not said who they are funded by other than Arriva, Stagecoach and these “public bodies”. Like what? All so bouncy and friendly and Jenni Murray – all so passive-aggressive. Also, who is Bobby that he gets to approve websites these days?

Ms. Belle, as usual, makes a very good point about Branson – and, anyway, why wouldn’t a man who receives millions in public subsidies to run his rotten trains, not support people who seek to curtail the means of private transport? Even if he, himself, drives a Bristol.

As for the ‘ramblers’ they have been a militantly Leftist body since the early decades of the last century and are one of darlings of ‘old labour’. No surprises there.

But I wonder how many twitchers, paying their fat fees to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (reputedly the most successful charity in Britain and, despite its innocuous name, one of the most hated, with good reason, by the late Auberon Waugh) realise they are helping support an organisation dedicated to opposing the very Volvos in which they trundle down to reserves to stare at birds – or whatever it is they get up to?

Cyclists are another interesting case. Almost unnoticed, a single company (Sustrans) has been paid phenomenal amounts of public money in recent years to buy-up and convert disused railway tracks and the like, which they then convert into cyclepaths. All very laudable to some, perhaps, but why has this monopoly been created? Who is involved? How much do they earn? What are their political affiliations? And, broken down per cyclist, just *how* much of the money stolen from us by this government of wastrels, has it cost? I would not be at all surprised if it turned out that the subsidy per cyclist (and genuine cyclists – not just people who ride a bike once a month) runs into hundreds – maybe more.

Operating very far beneath the radar of public awareness is a vast army of people being paid very substantial amounts of money to achieve nothing, but the goals of a handful of militant activists who represent no one but themselves. Self-styled experts in transport and ‘ecology’, in particular, are picking our pockets, contributing nothing whatever to the economy (and in the case of people like Transport 2000, actively harming it) all unseen and unacknowledged – apart from the grateful thanks they show when they flock to the polls to vote for their paymasters in ‘New’ Labour.

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